Rubin, Eli Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany (review)

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SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 770 everything from operational techniques to sexual partners, and if you read too long, your head is likely to spin. For long stretches, the titular Orlov appears only as a peripheral character or vanishes completely, and his reappearance sometimes seems a distraction from the larger narrative. That, of course, only reinforces Volodarsky’s central argument that Orlov was mostly a bit player in these events, and by the time he is done it is impossible to believe otherwise. However, Stalin’s Agent is much more than a deconstruction of the odious and overblown Orlov. Volodarsky boasts that ‘the book seeks to set the record straight and present an accurate picture of Soviet military intelligence operations in Europe and America in the interwar period and during the Spanish Civil War’, and if he doesn’t illuminate everything, he definitely casts plenty of light (p. 462). The heart of Orlov’s career, and the heart of the book, is the Spanish Civil War. Here Volodarsky goes against the grain of much earlier scholarship by arguing that ‘the Second Spanish Republic was not Stalin’s Spain’, and that the Soviets never came close to nor even conceived of creating an Iberian satellite regime (p. 278). Finally, even as Volodarsky demolishes Orlov’s legacy, he reveals fresh details of the much more important careers of two other Soviet operatives, agent-handler extraordinaire Arnold Deutsch and assassin Iosif Grigulevich, a man who ‘wasted a large part of his life travelling the world ready to kill for Stalin’ (p. 384). Stalin’s Agent is a must read for anyone seriously interested in the history of modern espionage, the Soviet aspect especially, and the history of the Spanish Civil War. It is likely to stand as a basic reference work for many years to come. Department of History Richard B. Spence University of Idaho Rubin, Eli. Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2016. xiii + 186 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. £50.00. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) left its imprint on the East German cityscape in numerous ways, most conspicuously in the massive Plattenbausiedlungen — prefabricated housing estates — that were built on the outskirts of many cities in the 1970s and 1980s. While they have more recently proven to be the cause of social, economic and material problems, they formed the centrepiece of Honecker’s ‘real existing socialism’, and promised to be the utopian future of socialism. Following Le Corbusier’s modernist ‘towers in a park’ concept, in which new cities were to be built on a tabula rasa, away from the material and moral decay of the old city mired by class oppression, the REVIEWS 771 new environment was to be a place of forgetting or, in Eli Rubin’s words, an amnesiopolis. As Rubin argues in this illuminating book, however, the past could not always be kept at bay, and while such estates presented a utopia for many new residents, they were also inextricably enmeshed within the structures of the party and the state. AsacasestudyofMarzahn,theGDR’slargesthousingprojectontheoutskirts of East Berlin, Amnesiopolis provides us with much detail on the planning and construction of an area that came to house just under 290,000 people. However, it also attempts to do much more than this. Through the examination of a variety of archival sources, published memoirs and interviews, Rubin seeks to investigate residents’ experiences of space and memory, in order to shed light on the quotidian and often diffuse structures of power that infused life in such socialist spaces. He does so in five chapters, the first two of which focus on the historical development and construction of Marzahn, and trace the original plan to resettle workers on the outskirts of the city back to the early twentieth century. Despite the GDR’s presentation of its Plattenbausiedlungen as radically new, the idea itself had been around for decades — and paradoxically featured in Albert Speer’s plan for Berlin. During the construction process itself, Germany’s more distant past also emerged through archaeological remains in the area — a sign that settlements were not being built on this land for the first time. Rubin...